COAST IS TOAST: Nation Media Group Kills Its Mombasa Bureau, Sends Journalists Home

A lorry. That is what is coming for the Nation Media Group’s Mombasa bureau on March 2. Not a new lease agreement.

Not a memo announcing a fresh start. A lorry, dispatched from Nairobi, to haul away desks, chairs, computers and the accumulated years of one of Kenya’s most storied regional newsrooms. For the journalists left behind in Mombasa town, the metaphor could not be more brutal.

Nation Media Group, the Aga Khan-owned media empire that once bestrode East and Central Africa like a colossus, has officially confirmed the closure of its Mombasa bureau effective March 1, 2026, in what insiders describe as the most dramatic single act in a slow-motion corporate collapse that has been playing out for nearly three years.

The Mombasa bureau, housed on Nkrumah Road, was the largest of NMG’s regional operations outside Nairobi. It was not just an office. It was a nerve centre for coast journalism, a posting coveted by ambitious reporters, a symbol of what it meant for a media house to take the regions seriously. Now it is being turned into a “remote working model” — corporate language that, in practice, means journalists will file their stories from hotel lobbies, cybercafes and living rooms.

“We are shocked by the move,” a Mombasa-based NMG employee, speaking anonymously to protect their job, told this publication. “We don’t understand. We are just confused.”

The confusion is understandable. NMG CEO Geoffrey Odundo, in a circular to staff released on February 20, framed the closure not as a retreat but as a forward march — describing it as part of the company’s “North Star Strategy” to become a “digital-first, audience-driven media house.” Editor-in-Chief Joe Ageyo, he said, had already held direct engagements with the Mombasa team. Leases at other regional bureaus, Odundo confirmed, will be terminated as they expire.

The company insists it is not withdrawing from regional journalism. The editorial presence, it says, “remains essential to our mission.” What changes, the management argues, is the physical footprint.

That is one way of saying it. Another is to look at the numbers.

From a high watermark of Ksh 2.5 billion in net profits in the 2012-2013 financial year, NMG has been in near-continuous decline. In 2023, the company reported a net loss of Ksh 205.7 million, the first annual loss in over a decade.

In 2024, it got worse: a Ksh 254.4 million net loss, even as management spent a staggering Ksh 157.8 million on staff restructuring, essentially paying enormous sums to reduce the payroll.

Revenue, which once peaked at Ksh 13.4 billion, fell to Ksh 6.2 billion in 2024, lower than what the company earned in 2020 during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first half of 2025 brought marginal relief, with the loss narrowing to Ksh 41.7 million from Ksh 345.8 million in the same period the previous year. But insiders concede the company is nowhere near recovery.

The enemy, as NMG’s succession of chief executives has repeatedly pointed out, is the smartphone. Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok have devoured the advertising revenues that once funded foreign correspondents, investigative units and spacious regional bureaus with permanent staff.

The Daily Nation, once the newspaper of record for an entire continent, has watched its circulation crater as readers migrated online. The paywall strategy that was supposed to monetise digital audiences has not delivered the results the boardroom was banking on.

What followed were the layoffs. Round after round, year after year. In 2024 alone, over 180 employees were shown the door, including marquee names such as journalist Dennis Okari and news anchor Mark Masai.

In November 2025, NMG quietly axed dozens of long-serving contributors and correspondents, sending them terse one-month termination notices that thanked them for their years of service in a single line.

The Mombasa closure is the first casualty of the new bureau strategy under Odundo, who took the helm in mid-2024 after his predecessor Stephen Gitagama departed in circumstances widely interpreted as a board loss of confidence in the pace of digital transformation.

But the Mombasa closure is unlikely to be the last. NMG’s other major regional bureaus, including Kisumu, Nakuru, Nyeri and Eldoret, are all understood to be facing similar fates as their leases come up for renewal.

Already, the smaller bureaus in Meru, Kakamega and Kisii have been quietly converted into remote working arrangements, their staff sent home long before the Mombasa announcement.

The pattern is unmistakable. Kenya’s largest media company is shrinking, bureau by bureau, floor by floor, journalist by journalist, towards a digital core that it has not yet convincingly built.

For the coast, the implications go beyond the fate of a few NMG employees. A media house without a bureau in Mombasa is a media house that will struggle to cover Mombasa. Regional stories, which require presence, relationships and institutional knowledge built over years of posting, do not file themselves from Nairobi.

The coast has its own politics, its own economy, its own disasters, its own scandals. The argument that a journalist working from a Mombasa cybercafe is equivalent to one with a desk, a contact book and an editorial structure behind them does not hold water in any serious newsroom.

NMG disagrees, at least officially. The company says technology and remote working have transformed what is possible. Perhaps. But technology has not yet replaced the journalist who drives to the scene, who knows which police officer to call, who has been covering the port for fifteen years and can tell when something smells wrong.

The lorry arrives on March 2. After that, the Nkrumah Road office will belong to someone else. The journalists will be at home, waiting for their laptops to connect, hoping the Wi-Fi holds.